It's not apples-to-apples though due to the difference in heating efficiency. If you use N kWh to heat your house with a gas boiler, you'll use N/P to heat it with a heat pump. P is something like 3 or 4, depending on various factors (and who you ask).
Potentially bigger. There are a lot of old non-condenser boilers out there, with a typical efficiency of about 70%. And even condensers are often not much better than 75-80%; to hit the faceplate 90%+ efficiencies the system needs to be balanced such that the return temperature is in quite a narrow range.
Depends on the context; if you are presently using x kWh of electricity for non-heating plus 2x kWh of gas for heating, your options for electrical heating are either to 3x your electricity demand by "upgrading" to resistive, or 1.5x (or whatever) your demand by upgrading to a heatpump.
There's other stuff you can also do, but costs are all over the place, e.g. my 110 ish sqm house in Berlin is so well insulated (and has heat pump) that even while it's snowing outside it's hot enough indoors to be naked, for an electricity bill that's lower than that of my 37 square meter apartment in the UK, despite German electricity prices being much higher.
Heating from gas is quite peaky (morning and evening heating cycles), whereas heat pumps are best when run low-and-steady.
Assuming 2/3 of residential heat demand transitions to heat pumps, and assuming an optimistic COP of 3 in the worst weather (highest flow temperatures, lowest air temperatures ... perhaps more like 2.5), then the power required to heat this fraction of houses is 2/3 / 3 = 2/9 of the mean gas demand. [0] linked report figure 1 shows a (smoothed by eyeball) demand of around 140GW "local gas demand" during the Beast from the East. This implies heat pumps would take over 31GW to power, which is more like 60% of the current UK electricity supply.
Sorry, alignment issue! Probably transport is less troublesome as it has a decent element of demand side response to it (batteries sufficiently large for a couple of days without charging).
> We're already at 70%+ of our energy coming from non-fossil-fuel sources
Is it actually the case on an annualised basis? Or was it just the case when you looked at the live grid data? (There is also the issue with "biomass", which is wood imported from abroad to be burnt)
But surely it's not an apple to apples comparison?
Wind farms can only generate electricity when it's windy. While you might be able to get cheaper energy from wind when it's windy, but unlike other technologies such as gas or nuclear with wind you still need to build out and maintain infrastructure for base power load when it's not windy.
Surely you need to factor that double build cost in with wind and solar since it's not required if you were to build out say nuclear power plants with similar output?
It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity. And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt. Most of the cost is drilling wells, liquifying gas, shipping it, unloading it, etc. All those other costs are much lower because the generators only run a small fraction of the time.
If you go to https://winderful.uk and set the date range to a year, you can get a sense of how many long dips there are.
> It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity.
The expected load factor for offshore wind power is around 50%. Much better than onshore wind (~35%) but still far from perfect. You can compensate some part of it by installing more power than what you need, but then you must pay for the unused capacity (£1.5B paid last year).
> And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
A day maybe, but in winter night last up to 16 hours. And wind droughts can last more than two weeks.
> But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt
But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Renewable are an important leverage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are also really challenging to work with, far from the simplistic view people can have on the internet.
Correct, this is the problem that the Tories failed to identify when they started to reduce fossil fuel usage. It was a political decision taken to shore up support with people who ended up moving to the Lib Dems anyway (and everything unravelled anyway with Brexit for Cameron, who was probably the biggest proponent of this...Lib Dems incidentally also played a key role in blocking nuclear).
Comparing the prices of these two things does not tell you what the eventual cost is going to be.
To explain the context: the UK had to cap electricity prices because costs have risen so much, government is paying huge subsidies to providers, minister made bombastic claims in the last election that he could fix everything, nothing has worked out, he has now set up a range of quangos to employ his friends (reducing quangos was one of the promises in the election) who are now briefing the press aggressively with other lobbyists that costs are going to drop...despite the government having no political ability to do anything that will reduce costs (the latest briefing is that new gas plants are too expensive, an obviously misleading comparison on many levels).
UK electricity prices are extraordinarily high, the political context is that you have to say this will reduce them. This is obviously not going to lead prices to fall but the context has to be the same.
The other question is why we are doing this if this isn't going to actually cause prices to fall? As with many similar problems in the UK: too many people making too much money. Government is now subsidizing retail electricity prices to pay for private sector investment in high-cost technology that guarantees a high ROI. Most of the people quoted in the government's presser are lobbyists, as I said above a cottage industry of quangos has now sprung up surrounding Miliband. There is no way back.
In terms of macro, it is definitely quite interesting because the last few years of this have essentially made it impossible for the UK to operate as a modern industrial economy. How do you maintain employment with essentially no industrial function? Energy prices are so high commercially that some services businesses are actually struggling too. It is incredible employment and wages are so high in the UK (although the level of economic support the government is providing, particularly in services, is huge).
You need to have the right levels of energy available at all times. But that doesn't mean baseload any more. Hasn't for ages. It means having a variety of different sources that tend to be available at different times, backstopped with something like gas turbines.
The gas and other base load infrastructure are largely built, it just needs maintenance which is a lower cost than building something new. The CfD is a competitive process, so the price (should) fully incorporate the cost to build the infrastructure, maintain it, operate it and make a profit.
My understanding is that base load tends to refer to a source that produces constantly to cover base usage levels round the clock. That’s what nuclear is good for, and then you have other technologies that service the peaks it can’t quickly scale to.
That’s not really a relevant model any more with renewables, what you need is in-fill for times the main power source isn’t producing well. As a complementary power source you want something agile and switchable. Usually this is gas generators which are easy to spin up/down more or less instantly. Obviously gas is not ideal as it’s still a fossil source, so some countries are looking at batteries etc to service those loads.
That is correct. Which is managed by the day ahead market. If you can produce electricity when the grid is strained you will be paid a lot.
The problem with for example new built nuclear power is that it is essentially only fixed costs. Therefore it does not complement renewables at all.
Why should someone buy expensive grid based nuclear power when renewables deliver?
We've seen people starting to muse on the "unraveling of the grid monopoly" now when renewables allow consumers to vote with their wallets rather than accepting whatever is provided.
UK bills are pretty spicy but at least energy mix is trending in a good direction. Lots of wind, more interconnects, bit of nuclear and solar and with battery tech improving I’m hopeful this will land well eventually
We don't think reason about electricity generation in terms of portfolio construction. Renewables are cheap (although that's debatable in some ways) but volatile.
However good this news is, it means nothing if the average household is not seeing any price decrease in their bill.
It's well and good to say that eventually sometime in the future prices will be lower but in the meantime it doesn't help that the prices continue to rise.
While a bill reduction is definitely useful and important for the people of the UK, energy independence is also important for the nation.
Exposure to international fossil fuel markets has been a problem for many nations in recent years, as turmoil upsets supply. And greater energy independence also means handing less money over to countries and governments with conflicting defence goals.
> energy independence is also important for the nation.
None of this matters to people who can't afford to heat their homes in the winter.
The price reduction was a Labour campaign promise and on that front it has failed dramatically.
This is why people lose trusts in politicians and what has fueled the rise of the far right across Europe, when politicians make promises that they know they won't be able to keep.
> The government argues that wind projects are cheaper than new gas power stations and will "bring down bills for good", but the Conservatives have accused its climate targets of raising energy costs.
Those for it say it is cheaper electricity, those against it say it is more expensive electricity. The cult members of each side say these are indisputable facts.
All I know is that when the wind blows and the sun shines my electricity costs £0.00 (or less) - I expect this comes at some kind of cost however.
Assuming you're talking about Agile Octopus / Time of use tariffs, if you look at the price distribution for December: https://agileprices.co.uk/?fromdate=20251231 , negative prices are very rare compared to expensive prices.
Yes, negative is rare, but I wouldn't say that it's overwhelmingly expensive.
The median range is 15p-20p (60% of the time in December) and the UK "price cap" is about 26.35p.
With a tariff like that, shifting usage outside of 4pm-7pm can lead to massive savings. With our usage from the Octopus API, I can see from OctopusCompare that in the past month my effective average unit cost would be 19.24p/kWh, and we don't do any specific load shifting.
Climate targets - including the Conservative ones, which have had the majority impact on UK emissions reductions - have definitely increased energy prices. Wind projects being cheaper than gas power stations is a capex comparison, not a consumer price one.
They're... not rented, you realise? Once the thing is installed, dependence on the manufacturer is limited, particularly for solar. I think you're confused on the wind turbines, btw; most North Sea wind seems to use equipment made by Siemens, Vestas or GE.
The alternative, gas, involves far more literal foreign dependencies; the gas has to come from somewhere.
The cult members will say whatever but you can measure cost. Wind is expensive, this project is expensive, and it won't lead to lower bills.
I am also not sure what you mean by "the Conservatives"...they started this about ten years ago. The issue was, something that was pointed out at the time, that they went into as a primarily political decision without any regard for the costs or trade-offs. The result has been much higher electricity prices. The position that Labour are taking is almost identical: anyone who disagrees with us a loon, pressers that are simultaneously obviously misleading and bombastic in the claims made (the presser for this has the head of a quango saying what a "stonking" job he is doing), and massive lobbyist intervention because of the need for subsidies (subsidies are now 4x the size of industry profits, almost all of the people quoted in the presser for this are lobbyists). Unfortunately, the reality of cult members is that they believe their cult is unique and special, and every other cult is wrong. This happened with the Tories ten years ago, it is happening with Labour now, in ten years it will be another party doing the same thing...it is how cults work.
I'm 'lucky' to live near a couple of offshore wind turbine 'fields'. From the shore these are barely visible many days of the winter, and when they are they cause me no concern or upset seeing them on the horizon. I actually find them pretty pleasing to see.
They are also building a heap of new energy transmission infrastructure here, which for now is bringing a fair few new jobs to the area - and going forwards there will continue be jobs in ongoing maintenance.
Coupled with the cheaper energy they provide, it all feels like wins for me - I hope we see much more generation planned, and I agree - if this means we need less (or none) nuclear power in the future, that feels like another win.
There's reasonable arguments for not building new nuclear (expensive, slow), but not for closing existing nuclear unless you have some specific reasons to believe it's unsafe! That is, specific to that plant in question.
Would have been more inspirational if they kept nuclear and didn't sabotage the French initiatives. I'm in germany and paying close to 40ct a kwh, that's 2+ times what you'd pay in nuclear first countries like france or slovakia. And no matter how fast germany switches to renewable, it'll never make up for the past 50 years of fuck ups in term of CO2 emissions
This hardly matters unless electricity prices for end consumers go down. And that can hardly happen without improved transmission lines and storage. And those are consistently being blocked by NIMBYs.
This is not a matter of policy, but of physics. Producers are far from consumers, in both time and space. Wind turbines are dispersed and far from cities, wind doesn't blow when there is high demand. And yet, these sources are being plugged into a grid that was built over decades under completely different assumptions.
No wonder the energy prices are high.
Edit:
Since some people don't believe that this matters, I'm attaching some basic sources about current state of UK power grid and necessary upgrades.
>The 8.4GW secured at this latest auction just about keeps the offshore wind target in reach, several analysts have told the BBC. But all those projects will still need connecting to the grid to generate electricity.
>"Getting that amount of capacity online by 2030 [will be] extremely challenging," said Nick Civetta, project leader at the Aurora Energy Research think tank.
That doesn't address the problem at all. Viking is connecting two grids together. This can help stabilize them in some scenarios. But much like in any other network, even if you have enough capacity almost everywhere, it doesn't matter, if you have a bottleneck on the path.
Existing grid has been built up with several high density sources, often very close to urban and industrial areas. Wind farms are, by their nature, neither of those.
There is enough material online about this issue. I'll gladly direct you to it.
Fantastic news. The UK is making real progress here, and hopefully this will be good news for prices and for energy security in the future.
We're already at 70%+ of our energy coming from non-fossil-fuel sources, much higher than I expected: https://grid.iamkate.com/
> We're already at 70%+ of our energy
Just to be picky… electricity…
We've still got a lot to do to decarbonise the rest of our energy usage EVs, heat pumps, improving housing stock, electric trains etc
I think a lot of that comes down to cost.
If we can drop the price of electricity enough it will naturally become the favoured choice for heating and transportation too.
imho, not picky at all - in fact, a critical distinction, as the transportation slice of the energy pie is really quite a large one.
My gas usage in KWh vastly outweighs my electricity usage.
It's not apples-to-apples though due to the difference in heating efficiency. If you use N kWh to heat your house with a gas boiler, you'll use N/P to heat it with a heat pump. P is something like 3 or 4, depending on various factors (and who you ask).
Potentially bigger. There are a lot of old non-condenser boilers out there, with a typical efficiency of about 70%. And even condensers are often not much better than 75-80%; to hit the faceplate 90%+ efficiencies the system needs to be balanced such that the return temperature is in quite a narrow range.
I don't see many heat pumps in the wild - I do see plenty of resistive heaters and electric "power showers" still.
As long as they're powered by "clean" electricity it doesn't really matter though.
Depends on the context; if you are presently using x kWh of electricity for non-heating plus 2x kWh of gas for heating, your options for electrical heating are either to 3x your electricity demand by "upgrading" to resistive, or 1.5x (or whatever) your demand by upgrading to a heatpump.
There's other stuff you can also do, but costs are all over the place, e.g. my 110 ish sqm house in Berlin is so well insulated (and has heat pump) that even while it's snowing outside it's hot enough indoors to be naked, for an electricity bill that's lower than that of my 37 square meter apartment in the UK, despite German electricity prices being much higher.
Yep, just checked and my gas is just under double my electricity for 2025.
9,000kWh for electricity vs 16,000kWh for gas
That’s with charging an EV too.
And construction as well. Concrete is emission-y.
Reducing the transportation slice of the pie is a double win as something 50% of marine transport is shipping hydrocarbons around the world
Usually calculated to be a 15-25% grid increase. Not massive compared to decarbonizing industries relying directly on fossil feedstock/energy.
Heating from gas is quite peaky (morning and evening heating cycles), whereas heat pumps are best when run low-and-steady.
Assuming 2/3 of residential heat demand transitions to heat pumps, and assuming an optimistic COP of 3 in the worst weather (highest flow temperatures, lowest air temperatures ... perhaps more like 2.5), then the power required to heat this fraction of houses is 2/3 / 3 = 2/9 of the mean gas demand. [0] linked report figure 1 shows a (smoothed by eyeball) demand of around 140GW "local gas demand" during the Beast from the East. This implies heat pumps would take over 31GW to power, which is more like 60% of the current UK electricity supply.
[0] https://ukerc.ac.uk/publications/local-gas-demand-vs-electri...
Not sure why you’re talking about heating when the parent, and my comment address transportation?
Sorry, alignment issue! Probably transport is less troublesome as it has a decent element of demand side response to it (batteries sufficiently large for a couple of days without charging).
> We're already at 70%+ of our energy coming from non-fossil-fuel sources
Is it actually the case on an annualised basis? Or was it just the case when you looked at the live grid data? (There is also the issue with "biomass", which is wood imported from abroad to be burnt)
Yes -- you can switch to see the past year's data. Fossil fuels are at about 29%!
Ah yes, I can see it now: 28.9% for fossil fuels over the past year.
Generally good news; about the price, 9p/unit is lower than retail prices but higher than current spot prices from https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/news-and-insight/data/data-portal/w...
No discussion of what grid upgrades are required, although increasing production near England should reduce that.
(by comparison, ongoing nuclear project Hinkley Point C is currently scheduled to come online some time around 2030, assuming no further delays)
It's a contract for difference, so that 9p is paying for both the infrastructure and the cost of the electricity it produces I believe.
When the market price is higher than the CfD price then the excess is used to reduce future electricity bills
https://www.lowcarboncontracts.uk/our-schemes/contracts-for-...
But surely it's not an apple to apples comparison?
Wind farms can only generate electricity when it's windy. While you might be able to get cheaper energy from wind when it's windy, but unlike other technologies such as gas or nuclear with wind you still need to build out and maintain infrastructure for base power load when it's not windy.
Surely you need to factor that double build cost in with wind and solar since it's not required if you were to build out say nuclear power plants with similar output?
Or am I wrong?
It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity. And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt. Most of the cost is drilling wells, liquifying gas, shipping it, unloading it, etc. All those other costs are much lower because the generators only run a small fraction of the time.
If you go to https://winderful.uk and set the date range to a year, you can get a sense of how many long dips there are.
> It's rare for there to be little wind in the North Sea. It's only a couple days a month when it's below 1/3 capacity.
The expected load factor for offshore wind power is around 50%. Much better than onshore wind (~35%) but still far from perfect. You can compensate some part of it by installing more power than what you need, but then you must pay for the unused capacity (£1.5B paid last year).
> And it's negatively correlated with solar: a day that's both cloudy and low-wind is very rare.
A day maybe, but in winter night last up to 16 hours. And wind droughts can last more than two weeks.
> But it does happen, so you need backups. The good news is that natural gas backup generators are fairly cheap per peak megawatt
But they have limited flexibility: you can't turn it on and off easily and there's limited power modulation you can do. That's why France keeps its gas output relatively constant in winter and do the modulation with nuclear despite its marginal cost being lower than gas on paper.
Renewable are an important leverage to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are also really challenging to work with, far from the simplistic view people can have on the internet.
Correct, this is the problem that the Tories failed to identify when they started to reduce fossil fuel usage. It was a political decision taken to shore up support with people who ended up moving to the Lib Dems anyway (and everything unravelled anyway with Brexit for Cameron, who was probably the biggest proponent of this...Lib Dems incidentally also played a key role in blocking nuclear).
Comparing the prices of these two things does not tell you what the eventual cost is going to be.
To explain the context: the UK had to cap electricity prices because costs have risen so much, government is paying huge subsidies to providers, minister made bombastic claims in the last election that he could fix everything, nothing has worked out, he has now set up a range of quangos to employ his friends (reducing quangos was one of the promises in the election) who are now briefing the press aggressively with other lobbyists that costs are going to drop...despite the government having no political ability to do anything that will reduce costs (the latest briefing is that new gas plants are too expensive, an obviously misleading comparison on many levels).
UK electricity prices are extraordinarily high, the political context is that you have to say this will reduce them. This is obviously not going to lead prices to fall but the context has to be the same.
The other question is why we are doing this if this isn't going to actually cause prices to fall? As with many similar problems in the UK: too many people making too much money. Government is now subsidizing retail electricity prices to pay for private sector investment in high-cost technology that guarantees a high ROI. Most of the people quoted in the government's presser are lobbyists, as I said above a cottage industry of quangos has now sprung up surrounding Miliband. There is no way back.
In terms of macro, it is definitely quite interesting because the last few years of this have essentially made it impossible for the UK to operate as a modern industrial economy. How do you maintain employment with essentially no industrial function? Energy prices are so high commercially that some services businesses are actually struggling too. It is incredible employment and wages are so high in the UK (although the level of economic support the government is providing, particularly in services, is huge).
You need to have the right levels of energy available at all times. But that doesn't mean baseload any more. Hasn't for ages. It means having a variety of different sources that tend to be available at different times, backstopped with something like gas turbines.
The gas and other base load infrastructure are largely built, it just needs maintenance which is a lower cost than building something new. The CfD is a competitive process, so the price (should) fully incorporate the cost to build the infrastructure, maintain it, operate it and make a profit.
My understanding is that base load tends to refer to a source that produces constantly to cover base usage levels round the clock. That’s what nuclear is good for, and then you have other technologies that service the peaks it can’t quickly scale to.
That’s not really a relevant model any more with renewables, what you need is in-fill for times the main power source isn’t producing well. As a complementary power source you want something agile and switchable. Usually this is gas generators which are easy to spin up/down more or less instantly. Obviously gas is not ideal as it’s still a fossil source, so some countries are looking at batteries etc to service those loads.
That is correct. Which is managed by the day ahead market. If you can produce electricity when the grid is strained you will be paid a lot.
The problem with for example new built nuclear power is that it is essentially only fixed costs. Therefore it does not complement renewables at all.
Why should someone buy expensive grid based nuclear power when renewables deliver?
We've seen people starting to muse on the "unraveling of the grid monopoly" now when renewables allow consumers to vote with their wallets rather than accepting whatever is provided.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...
while the führer of the US is doing all he can to stop offshore wind projects
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-cou...
UK bills are pretty spicy but at least energy mix is trending in a good direction. Lots of wind, more interconnects, bit of nuclear and solar and with battery tech improving I’m hopeful this will land well eventually
We don't think reason about electricity generation in terms of portfolio construction. Renewables are cheap (although that's debatable in some ways) but volatile.
However good this news is, it means nothing if the average household is not seeing any price decrease in their bill.
It's well and good to say that eventually sometime in the future prices will be lower but in the meantime it doesn't help that the prices continue to rise.
While a bill reduction is definitely useful and important for the people of the UK, energy independence is also important for the nation.
Exposure to international fossil fuel markets has been a problem for many nations in recent years, as turmoil upsets supply. And greater energy independence also means handing less money over to countries and governments with conflicting defence goals.
> energy independence is also important for the nation.
None of this matters to people who can't afford to heat their homes in the winter.
The price reduction was a Labour campaign promise and on that front it has failed dramatically.
This is why people lose trusts in politicians and what has fueled the rise of the far right across Europe, when politicians make promises that they know they won't be able to keep.
> The government argues that wind projects are cheaper than new gas power stations and will "bring down bills for good", but the Conservatives have accused its climate targets of raising energy costs.
Those for it say it is cheaper electricity, those against it say it is more expensive electricity. The cult members of each side say these are indisputable facts.
All I know is that when the wind blows and the sun shines my electricity costs £0.00 (or less) - I expect this comes at some kind of cost however.
Assuming you're talking about Agile Octopus / Time of use tariffs, if you look at the price distribution for December: https://agileprices.co.uk/?fromdate=20251231 , negative prices are very rare compared to expensive prices.
Yes, negative is rare, but I wouldn't say that it's overwhelmingly expensive.
The median range is 15p-20p (60% of the time in December) and the UK "price cap" is about 26.35p.
With a tariff like that, shifting usage outside of 4pm-7pm can lead to massive savings. With our usage from the Octopus API, I can see from OctopusCompare that in the past month my effective average unit cost would be 19.24p/kWh, and we don't do any specific load shifting.
Climate targets - including the Conservative ones, which have had the majority impact on UK emissions reductions - have definitely increased energy prices. Wind projects being cheaper than gas power stations is a capex comparison, not a consumer price one.
> All I know is that when the wind blows and the sun shines my electricity costs £0.00 (or less)
£0.00 and complete submission to china which produces 75% of solar panels, windmills and batteries to store their production
They're... not rented, you realise? Once the thing is installed, dependence on the manufacturer is limited, particularly for solar. I think you're confused on the wind turbines, btw; most North Sea wind seems to use equipment made by Siemens, Vestas or GE.
The alternative, gas, involves far more literal foreign dependencies; the gas has to come from somewhere.
The cost is that you need storage or alternatives. Solar is more predictable - you can have very long periods of low wind.
The cult members will say whatever but you can measure cost. Wind is expensive, this project is expensive, and it won't lead to lower bills.
I am also not sure what you mean by "the Conservatives"...they started this about ten years ago. The issue was, something that was pointed out at the time, that they went into as a primarily political decision without any regard for the costs or trade-offs. The result has been much higher electricity prices. The position that Labour are taking is almost identical: anyone who disagrees with us a loon, pressers that are simultaneously obviously misleading and bombastic in the claims made (the presser for this has the head of a quango saying what a "stonking" job he is doing), and massive lobbyist intervention because of the need for subsidies (subsidies are now 4x the size of industry profits, almost all of the people quoted in the presser for this are lobbyists). Unfortunately, the reality of cult members is that they believe their cult is unique and special, and every other cult is wrong. This happened with the Tories ten years ago, it is happening with Labour now, in ten years it will be another party doing the same thing...it is how cults work.
Great move.
Worked out very well in Germany, which is inspirational. Next up, get rid of the 5 remaining nuclear power plants.
I'm 'lucky' to live near a couple of offshore wind turbine 'fields'. From the shore these are barely visible many days of the winter, and when they are they cause me no concern or upset seeing them on the horizon. I actually find them pretty pleasing to see.
They are also building a heap of new energy transmission infrastructure here, which for now is bringing a fair few new jobs to the area - and going forwards there will continue be jobs in ongoing maintenance.
Coupled with the cheaper energy they provide, it all feels like wins for me - I hope we see much more generation planned, and I agree - if this means we need less (or none) nuclear power in the future, that feels like another win.
There's reasonable arguments for not building new nuclear (expensive, slow), but not for closing existing nuclear unless you have some specific reasons to believe it's unsafe! That is, specific to that plant in question.
Would have been more inspirational if they kept nuclear and didn't sabotage the French initiatives. I'm in germany and paying close to 40ct a kwh, that's 2+ times what you'd pay in nuclear first countries like france or slovakia. And no matter how fast germany switches to renewable, it'll never make up for the past 50 years of fuck ups in term of CO2 emissions
Think you may have that back to front. UK is building a large nuclear reactor currently and working by on SMRs after that
Somebody is not going to like the new windmills! He will fight them like Don Quijote. /s
This hardly matters unless electricity prices for end consumers go down. And that can hardly happen without improved transmission lines and storage. And those are consistently being blocked by NIMBYs.
This is not a matter of policy, but of physics. Producers are far from consumers, in both time and space. Wind turbines are dispersed and far from cities, wind doesn't blow when there is high demand. And yet, these sources are being plugged into a grid that was built over decades under completely different assumptions.
No wonder the energy prices are high.
Edit:
Since some people don't believe that this matters, I'm attaching some basic sources about current state of UK power grid and necessary upgrades.
https://electricalreview.co.uk/2024/09/20/survey-grid-connec...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp84yymxpjno
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68601354
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ofgem-approves-37-bi...
Even in the linked article:
>The 8.4GW secured at this latest auction just about keeps the offshore wind target in reach, several analysts have told the BBC. But all those projects will still need connecting to the grid to generate electricity.
>"Getting that amount of capacity online by 2030 [will be] extremely challenging," said Nick Civetta, project leader at the Aurora Energy Research think tank.
All of the winners in the current auction have grid connection slots it's part of the prerequisites for the process
We were always going to have to build out infrastructure as we decarbonise just as we'd have to build infrastructure if we remain on fossil fuel
Plus we get cleaner air and less health issues caused by pollution
This is such a nonsense comment.
> Producers are far from consumers
Distance from London to the biggest windfarms are 350 km [1]
This is the same distance as from Miami to Orlando (in Florida). Do you really think it is a problem transmitting electricity this distance.
You should try look at the international connections in Europe. Some are longer than this.
The Viking link between UK and Denmark is 765 km.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_offshore_wind_farms_in...
That doesn't address the problem at all. Viking is connecting two grids together. This can help stabilize them in some scenarios. But much like in any other network, even if you have enough capacity almost everywhere, it doesn't matter, if you have a bottleneck on the path.
Existing grid has been built up with several high density sources, often very close to urban and industrial areas. Wind farms are, by their nature, neither of those.
There is enough material online about this issue. I'll gladly direct you to it.
https://electricalreview.co.uk/2024/09/20/survey-grid-connec...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp84yymxpjno
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68601354
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ofgem-approves-37-bi...
As you can see, this isn't a new concern, and it isn't something I made up. Then something about delays:
https://www.thetimes.com/static/green-energy-net-zero-nation...